I love everything about Gentoo except one thing...it takes to damn long to install something . I don't really care about the performance increase you get with Gentoo I just think it's fun to install from scratch.

So, my question to you people is this. Do any of you know of a Linux Distro similar to Gentoo that you don't have to compile every single package? And don't say Arch because in my opinion that's just as easy to install as Ubuntu.

http://www.sabayon.org/_________________"Dear Enemy: may the Lord hate you and all your kind, may you be turned orange in hue, and may your head fall off at an awkward moment."
"Linux is like a wigwam - no windows, no gates, apache inside..."

If you want full binary (Sabayon has a lot of stuff that still needs to be compiled from source) and still be able to customize versions and USE flags and stuff, you're boned. It's basically FAR too cost-prohibitive for someone to do this.

As far as a semi-manual binary distro with an install like Gentoo, your only options are pretty much slackware (which introduces another flavour of hell), FreeBSD (or any of the BSD's really) or Arch.

If you want full binary (Sabayon has a lot of stuff that still needs to be compiled from source) and still be able to customize versions and USE flags and stuff, you're boned. It's basically FAR too cost-prohibitive for someone to do this.

As far as a semi-manual binary distro with an install like Gentoo, your only options are pretty much slackware (which introduces another flavour of hell), FreeBSD (or any of the BSD's really) or Arch.

I had fun installing Gentoo, too...
It reminded me of the days I grew up with a Commodore 64, and of the time I got my first PC with some MSDOS diskettes.

I had actually never used Linux before, except for a very brief test-drive on Ubuntu which didn't really do anything for me.
I'm still running the same install from a bit over a year ago, and I have been edging to do another. Partially perhaps to see if I can still do it or/and how much I would need to rely on the Handbook and such.
I got a couple of Laptops that I would like to do it on, but the other one seems to have a busted IDE-interface, so I would need an USB-drive for that as the only USB storage I have is a 4GiB stick (not that it isn't enough for the install, but I tend to use it for a lot of other stuff so I don't want to sacrifice it for that right now).
The other is a lot less powerful in terms of the CPU and I don't really want to imagine how long it would take to compile stuff in it. I have been thinking of doing it with my main machine via VirtualBox which I recently tried for the first time; runs windows 7 way better than I would have ever imagined.

As the Laptops are rather old, they indeed come with the issue you mention in the first post; slow compiling.
To that, I can only say that with a 6-core Phenom, I really don't have an issue with it, at all. Even the largest builds wont take too long in my opinion, and they can run in the background while I'm watching videos or gaming, or both!

So on that regard, if you lack in terms of compiling power, there are ways to improve that.
I do understand, though, if you want to install the largest of packages over and over and over and over again for some reason, then it would probably become rather annoying if you just want it installed... over and over again, with different configurations... for some reason... which wouldn't be possible with a binary one anyways...

Others have probably pointed out the best options for alternatives (which, I think, do not exist).
I wouldn't really know since Gentoo is the only Linux I have ever really used. ^^;_________________Kind Regards,
~ The Noob Unlimited ~